Objective
To construct a small autonomous and unmanned aircraft that can reach an altitude of 30km and carry a payload of under 10kg which can be launched into orbit from the aircraft.
Status
The Mark III is under construction. We have designed the main wing in SolidWorks, completed theoretical stress and fluid dynamics tests. The autopilot system is in the ate stages of design. Out goal is to have the wing constructed by December 2011.
MARK III – Prototype
28/03/2010 The UAV dev board v2 from Sparkfun has arrived, a big thanks goes out to Tim Carr at Mindkits for organising this.
It is intended that this UAV board will provide all of our unmanned flight control and navigation. It has 3 gyroscopes, a triple axis accelerometer and a powerful dsPIC processor.
The other components we ordered this time include:
OpenLog – A tiny Serial to Micro SD card recorder powered by the ATMega 328. This will serve as a black box for our experiments in the likely event of catastophic failure, with flames.
VenusGPS – A 10Hz GPS unit for high speed GPS tracking information; this will hopefully improve the accuracy of the UAV system. We look forward to contributing to the MatrixNav software which powers the UAV board by adding support for this inexpensive but powerful GPS.
15/04/2010: We have been working hard testing the new electronic components for Auto Launch. The OpenLog works perfectly and as expected. We have successfully logged multiple hours of data to the device and then have been able to plug the MicroSD card directly into the computer and access that data with absolute ease. We highly recommend this device to anyone looking for an all in one serial logging system.
The Venus GPS is also working as expected, outputting NMEA or Binary GPS data 10 times every second. I can’t wait to see what effect this has on the UAV system.
One small downer is the UAV board, we tried a cheaper programmer for the dsPIC and after many many hours attempting to program the dsPIC we have failed and conclude that the programmer is incapable of programming the UAV board. Our attempt to save money on the programmer was not a major problem other than wasted time. We are looking at better supported programmers now like the picKit2 or picKit3, the cost at the moment is a small hindrance, but we will be purchasing one of these shortly.
Tristan and Sam Connor have finalised the specifications of the primary wing and Sam has finished modelling the aerofoil shape for the MKIII prototype. We should be able to begin construction very soon 🙂
Wingspan: 3.6m
Chord Length: 0.88m
Density: 140 kg/m^3
Modulus of rigidity: 3.4 GPa
Modulus of rupture: 21.6 MPa
04/01/2011 The Carbon fibre tube is ready for the main wing of the PAL MKIII. Pictured here are two 4m lengths of 20mm diameter, 1mm wall thickness Carbon fibre tubing.